Demo of the Year: Photosynth
Yesterday, Gary Flake, head of Microsoft’s Live Labs, gave me a tour of Photosynth. It is simply the demo of the year. Certainly the coolest thing showed off this week at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Gary gives a great demo.
Behind me there were a couple of Web 2.0 summit attendees and they were whispering to each other “f***ing amazing.” Even better than you can load this on your own computer, get it on the Photosynth site.
I’m going to take the rest of the day off. In fact, I might take all of next week off from my text blog to dedicate time to answering email and to getting caught up on ScobleShow editing tasks.
Powered By 
November 10th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
How is a proprietary application that only works on Windows and only in Internet Explorer via ActiveX Web 2.0 material?
November 10th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Bob: I don’t really care. It’s a freaking awesome demo.
And maybe it’s Microsoft’s way of reminding you that the Web can’t do it all.
November 10th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
Looked at the videos, and the Demo. I dunno. It seems like something you would have fun playing with for a while, and then forget about. I can’t see myself using it as a tool to look through my pictures.
November 10th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
I hadn’t heard of this project until yesterday, when threads on channel9 and digg referenced it. I have to say it is absolutely amazing. :-)
November 10th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
@Bob Jones-did you read the blog where they say they are working to make it run on other browsers? This will make home slideshows super cool. I agree that it is going to be fun to play with this. Top demo of the year-exactly.
November 10th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Steve: I thought about noting that it doesn’t have a whole lot of utility. But, screw it, it’s a fantastically cool technology and we should celebrate it on just that point alone. Not everything has to be utilitarian to be cool.
Hell, a great piece of art isn’t useful.
November 10th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
I read some thoughts on digg about how this can be useful. One of which is that a project is set up to make a 3d mosaic of a particular place, for example, Disney World, where millions of people visit each year and 100s of millions of photos are taken. People are invited to sumbit their pictures to the project’s site, and a 3D mosaic of Disney World is created from the millions of photos.
November 10th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Remember this? http://preview.local.live.com/
Now imagine what you’ll have after Microsoft runs all that data (pictures of most streets of Seattle) through Photosynth. All of a sudden, you have a complete 3D model of Seattle. Or at least a 3D model of the street level of Seattle. Throw in some “Bird’s Eye View” data from local.live.com, merge in the skyscraper building textures from the 3D Virtual Earth where they are needed, and you have some VERY cool possibilities.
Personally, I’ll admit that I’ve already taken about 60 pictures of my study abroad dorm room so that I can look back on it in a few years.
To relatives: “This is what my dorm room looked like in Mexico.” followed by lots of oohs and ahhhs as I zoom in and pan around
Plus it’ll just be cool to look at when I have the ability to make my own datasets.
November 10th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
I covered Photosynthy pretty long time back (have a look here).
It certainly is an amazing tool!
November 10th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
And well, the Photosynth blog is one of the typical MS blogs which MS never updates!! I subscribed to it 2/3 months back and hell! not even a single post!
November 10th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
I am reading this post on OSX using a lynx browser in a bash terminal session. I guess this one is out for me too :P
November 10th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Cool, this takes 360 panos that guys do manually in apps like realvis stitcher and takes it to a new, automaticaly generated l level.
November 10th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
@Will
Yep, when you restrict yourself to less-advanced technology you don’t get to experience great things. Stop whining and do it yourself or get the tools you need.
November 10th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Yes Robert. You still are Microsoft’s bitch.
November 10th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
Too bad that after ten tries it stall hasn’t managed to successfully install on my computer.
Yes, my computer meets and exceeds all requirements and I did sign in as administrator.
Aside from the fact that it didn’t work - NOTHING Microsoft does like this is going to be worth squat to me if it means I have to log out, log on as administrator, find my way back, install, then log back out and back in as a limited user. I’ll do that for an application I know I want but only very rarely for something like this (Faigin got me curious).
November 10th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
I’m surprised you didn’t check out the demo in July when they showed Photosynth at SIGGRAPH–that was months ago..
November 10th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
I would, but I can’t view it on my MacBook Pro. XP SP2 and Vista only.
Doug
November 10th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Ewww, the demo only works on IE. Hopefully that’ll change soon. I’ll try it out as soon as I can work up the willpower to push than unpleasant little “E” icon.
November 10th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
[...] It blew the Scobleizer away too. [...]
November 10th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Seadragon is amazing : http://labs.live.com/seadragon.aspx
You can actually see the technology at work when viewing the Gary Faigin Art Studio. Try zooming into the artwork on display using your scroll wheel.
Would love to see this implemented in a virtual library that contains all the rare and famous books that are currently owned by different collectors & organizations. Scan them in super hi-rez and store them using Photosynth and allow anyone to walk in a virtual library, picking books and reading them.
November 10th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
@6 I’m guessing the MS shareholders hope that attitude doesn’t take hold across all of Microsoft. Surely MS invested some considerable resources in producing this. I’m guessing the shareholders would like to know how MS plans to recoup that investment.
November 11th, 2006 at 1:06 am
This is just cool. Nuf said…
November 11th, 2006 at 8:50 am
even though i photosynth perhaps wouldn’t be “useful”, microsoft still has the technology. and it could make its way into other products.
having said that, i could easly see me uploading (or syncing my flickr photos) with some sort of online database, and explore the locations from there via my and other photos. not productive-useful, but a cool experience.
November 11th, 2006 at 10:13 am
I too thought this had been demo’d months ago. However, I went to have a look, opened up IE (eugh) and sure enough nothing worked. Long gone are the days when I would spend hours trying to get something from MSFT to work so that I could be wowed -it’s 2006, not 1996 - so I guess that’s that for me.
November 11th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Take some time off, you deserve it. Thanks for keeping us up to date on the state of the art.
November 11th, 2006 at 11:19 am
I’m still waiting for something conneceted to the Novell/MSFT thing :-)
November 11th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
LOL
I like how the Microsoft haters are trying to either belittle this project or avoid even trying it for fear that they just might like it. Amusing, but also pathetic.
November 11th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
right… I’m not one of those BTW…anyone would be able to tell that from my blog
November 11th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
It is very cool and innovative. Excellent job in 1. Design 2. User Interface 3. Concept 4. Technology 5. Utilization of basic research and academic research on potential commercial application 6. Marketing (Video & Demo).
The only drawbacks are installation required, availability in IE, need minimum cluster of similar photos to construct a more complete scenes.
Questions:
How can you sort out photos taken from different weather, time, and age? It is easy to photograph a preserved tourist spot because there will be minimal renovation to preserve historic buildings. How do you handle a city that constantly changing landscape? Good example is Hong Kong. The city pull down existing buildings and rebuild with newer buildings around the year. How do you handle constantly changing landscape?
There are many photo switches techniques, software and plug-in for online 360 degree viewing. What are the advantages of using Photostynth over existing techniques?
I wouldn’t be surprise if Adobe come up with similar photo viewing based on their Flash and Flex technology. Flash works well in all browsers and most users have Flash Players.
November 11th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
@21: I believe Microsoft bought this in, at least according to the C9 video from July - http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=221703
Not that this makes it any less cool though :)
November 11th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
I have to agree, this is a super cool application and as has already been picked up on the use of this on the Internet, for example Flicker, could take input from Flicker and arrange a 3D collage that could be posted back to the Internet or your own blog - who knows maybe they’ll be some cool gadget/widget made available to exploit this technology?
November 11th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
And the security/military applications of this tool is going to make waves, imagine if you can apply it to video material as well.. Minority Report
November 11th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
It’s kinda clunky, but man, it is the future. The obvious thing would be, as others have mentioned, to point this badboy at Flickr’s enormous database of photos and render, you know, the whole planet.
November 11th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Precursor to Blade Runner…
THis reminds of the scene in BR where Dekker(sic?) inserts a photo of a living room into a machine and is able to maneuver to ‘uncaptured implied areas’ within the photo..pretty cool.
That being said, for all the gee-wizziness about Photosynth, the technology gets in the way of enjoying the actual images. And by that i mean the shimmering silhouettes and dynaamic boxes distract and overshadow the content of the images themselves.
Also, the install leaves much to be desired. Hopefully they’ll have an extensiion for Firefox, which everyone knows, is the the best browser available…
November 11th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
I have been playing around with this for a while (we were able to download it internally more than a week ago and I see it as not only being cool but having great application outside of just family vaction photo sharing. Think of all the business maps of campus facilities or building layouts that could have photsynth components that allow for seeing and navigating through them. Get to know what a place looks like before you get there.
I will just be happy to post my family vacation pics up though like this. :-)
November 11th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
@27. Hey, I’d love to try it. Unfortunately MS thinks the world is only made up of Windows and IE users.
November 12th, 2006 at 6:00 am
The product is not even in beta form yet. The product team however is committed to getting this running on multilpe browsers without an OS dependency. An active X release for pre-beta was an easy no brainer that allows more than 90 of home computer users an opportunity to try the technology while they further develop it and work on cross browser rendering. To be fair even Google does the same thing with their client based apps like Google desktop, etc. They first come out with a Windows version and then maybe come out with another version. I have been pestering them about versions of deskyop and some other apps for my Ubuntu liux box that I use for cross browser testing on web stuff for awhile and am still waiting) Moving toward cross browser/OS is something many the teams at MSFT seem to be working on so with them publicly stating that is where they are going I believe they are and you should be able to try it.
November 12th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Not sure if the product will translate into an operational version though. I mean they need to solve lots of problems before coming to it, even if it is promising.
November 12th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
[...] Just downloaded PhotoSynth after watching Robert’s video on the subject. PhotoSynth stitches hundreds of photos together to build a 3D representation of a place. You can move around inside that space with your mouse and zoom in on individual photos to get a really high res view. I remember seeing something like this a few years back, but it didn’t give you access to the original photos in the way this does. Very, very cool. I can’t wait till you can create your own collections. I don’t care that it takes days of cpu time. [...]
November 12th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
[...] I had an impromptu chat with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Architect of Microsoft Photosynth — some are calling his and Gary Flake’s presentation the Demo of the Year. Afterwards in the hallway, Blaise listened carefully to my description of Grupthink, asked a couple questions, pondered it a moment, and provided truly thoughtful feedback. Thanks Blaise! On Friday night, we went on the Bubble-free pub crawl — or at least we tried to. There were some last minute scheduling and location changes and we only hooked up with the group at the very end — but that’s where the real fun began. I was of course pleased we were able to make it to two breweries along the way, and the lengthy conversations I had with Stowe Boyd of Blue Whale Labs were invigorating, enlightening, and challenging; some of the best of my week in SF. Lots of food for thought and I look forward to additional conversations with Stowe. [...]
November 13th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
Yep I was way too negative - it is in delta after all. Still thought it was out a while ago tho.
November 16th, 2006 at 11:42 am
I am amazed that folk don’t see applications… working in humanitarian and development work the potential for Pro Tools to be developed when combined with satellite imagery is huge… think post disaster assessment (in isolated locations) for example… suddenly all those tourist snaps, uploaded online create a potential baseline… globalnomad101
November 19th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
[...] Thanks to Microsoft labs and Photsnyth this possibility is already a reality, though not commercially available. Scoble has posted a video of a demo by Gary Flake at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit, or go direct to demo’s online. Photosynth software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. [...]
November 20th, 2006 at 9:51 am
[...] Demo of the Year: Photosynth [...]
November 22nd, 2006 at 8:54 am
[...] I’ve just mentioned a post by Robert Scoble, and I mentioned Photosynth a couple of weeks ago. Before I went to Barcelona, I downloaded Scoble’s video showing Photosynth - it was in QuickTime .MOV format and I hadn’t put QuickTime onto the build of Vista I was running. [...]
March 30th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
“How is a proprietary application that only works on Windows and only in Internet Explorer via ActiveX Web 2.0 material?
Comment by Bob Jones”
i use firefox and it works just fine